wired network?

[mclien]

is there any way to get a wired ethernet connection with the pocket book.
With some USB or SD Adapters?

[rkomar]

If there is, you would be the first to accomplish it.

[mclien]

Thats what I suspected.
Most likely, because I'm the only one who wants a wired network connection to an ebookreader.
OK, what would be the way?
1.Frist I think there are some ethernet over usb adapters
2.hopefully there are some that have linux support
3.the kernel module has to be ported to arm
4.one would need usb-host support on th reader (oh, maybe thats first point)

For the "Why at all, when there is WiFi?" Questions:
1. Paranoia
2. Health

The main Idea is to use the Pocketbook as an alarmclock replacement with ntp and musik playback form a music collection of a NAS.
(and I'd rather avoid having WiFi "traffic" in my bedroom)

[rkomar]

Okay. It would be a lot of work, but might be fun if you're bent that way.

You would probably need to load new modules built and installed by you. For that you need root privileges, so you wouldn't be able to update to the latest firmware versions (they haven't been rooted yet). It's possible that the USB hardware in the reader has OTG capabilities and could be put into host mode. If it's possible and you accomplished that, then you could build more modules for supporting other USB devices. Even then, who knows if the reader can power the plugged in USB devices, and if so, how long the battery would last doing it. Remember that it only charges by the USB port, so you couldn't charge and host another device at the same time.

Speaking of power, the device is able to go for weeks without a recharge because it is very aggressive at going into sleep mode when you aren't interacting with it (via buttons and stylus). If you're constantly running something on it (e.g. music player), you will have to recharge way more often. Maybe the reader isn't the right device for what you want to use it for. I don't want to keep you from trying, as it seems like a very interesting project, but I want you to be realistic about the outcome.

[mclien]

OK, I see. The wired netword part ist possibly to hard to go (at leat for me).
(but I can't forget the rapsberry pi, which drives ethernet over the usb 2.0 chip...)

The main idea is a bit rough at the time and comes from another projct I did: An old Toshiba_Libretto which I use as an alarmclock. It's mainly a special Linux distro, which runs without GUI and some shell scripts and ASCII Art (to have the time displayed in big numbres) and using cron for the alarm functions. Alarm sound is musik from the users playlist via nfs from my server, with a fallback to one locally stored track (if network is down for some reason).

So the device and monitor is on 24/7 it's not the energy friendliest device (ok 13W isn't that much..) and I was thinking to improve that by using the Pocketbook to get the powerconsumption a bit lower..

Perhaps (if it works) make a nice stand for the ebook, wich charges it and has some sort of ambilight controlled lamb to replace the missing backlight.

Fro proof of concept it's perhaps wiser to to the WiFi way for testing first.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by mclien

Fro proof of concept it's perhaps wiser to to the WiFi way for testing first.

Yes, I agree with this strategy very much. You have a fair bit of work even without getting network access via USB. You'll need to install cron, and some streamed music player, and build some program to display a clock. Keep in mind that the reader is binary compatible with the Debian Lenny armel distribution. You can copy binary files from the latter to the former, and even do development in Debian. You can run Lenny under qemu on a Linux system. It's slow, but works. The clock will need to link with the Inkview library to run the display, so that you can build that using the PocketBook SDK.

Note also that you can start and stop networking via the Inkview SDK. So, you can leave it off most of the time, and just turn it on when you need it (like when you want to stream the music, or when you want to sync via ntp). That will greatly save on battery usage and reduce WiFi emissions from the reader.

Edit: Note that you can also write your C/C++ program to sleep most of the time and do it's stuff at some time, so you don't strictly need cron. Without cron, you also don't need root privileges to install and run your program.

[mclien]

Thanks a lot so far.
So the concept could be:
use as many software as possible from the lenny armel pool, that would be:
-ntp (or some other time syncing tool)
-ogg123 (for ogg playback)
-nfs (for mounting the music-dir from the server)

and a Programm, which:
- displays the time (optional date and forthcomming alarm timers)
- syncs time once a day/week (sunday 3:30 AM, to catch 1-hour time drift at daylightsaving). With switching off WiFi after sync.
- at wakeup time, turns on WiFi, mount the nfs dir, starts playing music with increasing loudnes (via shellscript perhaps), which stops/delays, when pressing a specific Button (OK perhaps, easyest to find blindly..). When stoped umounts nfs dir, switch of WiFi.

Most time consuming: learning C/C++ (to me. Just used shell scripts so far)

Oh, there is a clock on the PB already. Any idea, if that is GPL code?

[rkomar]

Yes, that's pretty much what I was suggesting.

The SDK has a clock program in its sources directory. Maybe that can be modified for your purposes (like stretching it to fit the display) and doing the alarm stuff. If you don't know C/C++, you're in for a steep learning curve, at least for displaying the time full-screen. But with the working clock program in the SDK, you can add stuff to it bit-by-bit, checking to see that if builds and works each step of the way. It's not a bad way to learn C.